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Posts Tagged ‘Crosby Stills Nash and Young’

You’re an artist. It’s noon and you’ve been awake for at least 15 minutes. You’ve gargled your first gallon of coffee. It’s time to get your game on. How do you welcome your Muse? Yoga? Affirmations? Mixed martial arts?

Michelangelo opened himself to inspiration with his paint-by-numbers kit. John Steinbeck typed up everything that had happened to him on his way to his office. Bruce Springsteen drives down a dusty beach road and counts the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets. When Stormin’ Gorman Thomas played for the Seattle Mariners, he rapped himself in the back of his head with his bat. I’m not making this up about Steinbeck and Stormin’ Gorman.

For years, before I wrote a new post for this blog, I began by standing for the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But from now on, I’ll take a knee.

Summer 2017 in review: Part 1

Estate sales: books, music, stickers, colored pencils, tools I don’t need, kitchen gadgets from another century, the insides of old weird houses. Scavenging in the debris field of other people’s lives – what’s not to like?

For a quarter or maybe 50 cents, I can pick up a CD I know nothing about or don’t remember. Sometimes this works. Here are some albums I tried this summer that didn’t. I’ll never see that dollar again.

It’s raining men

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were four of the manliest men you’d ever want to man up with. This Anglo-Saxon army is responsible for three classics of the Classic Rock rockin’ Caucasians classic era: the studio albums Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969) and Déjà Vu (1970) and their live set, 4 Way Street (1971). But after 1971, nothing happened. And still more nothing. What’s a record company to do?

I’ll tell you what Atlantic Records did. They took a chunk of the first record and a chunk of the second record and added “Ohio” and gave us So Far in 1974. Is So Far a greatest-hits album or an intelligence test? If it was the second, CSNY’s fans flunked, because So Far went right to the top of Billboard’s Hot 200 Albums chart.

In 1974, before disco suctioned out their bone marrow, CSNY was so big that you could carve “CSNY” into a slice of Wonder Bread and CSNY fans would fight to use it for their next Holy Communion.

Just buy the first three albums, OK?

A useful way of understanding this band is measuring them in Units of Monkees. David Crosby was Michael Nesmith, Stephen Stills was Michael Nesmith, Graham Nash was stuck being Davey Jones because he’s English even though he’s really Michael Nesmith, and Neil Young was Michael Nesmith. If I had been in CSNY, I would’ve been Peter Tork.

Nerdz 2 men

R.E.M. always acted as if they had no sense of humor, probably because they didn’t. The closest they came to a good laugh (on us) was Dead Letter Office (1987), a collection of songs the band forgot, songs the band was too drunk to remember, songs the band didn’t like, and songs the band took apart and rebuilt later but without much enthusiasm. And I’m quoting from their own liner notes!

What a bunch of fun-loving hooligans. Imagine their surprise when their fans fell for it. Dead Letter Office peaked at 52 on the Hot 200. Mazal tov, R.E.M. fans! I’d sell you a bridge, but the CSNY fans already bought it.

While I admit there are a couple of good songs on this disc (particularly “Windout,” which rocks), it’s mostly made up of songs I wish I was too drunk to remember. This includes their cover of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” Let me tell you something, my fine motherfuckers: The words are “I’m a man of means,” not “I’m a man of men”!

Crash Davis after confiscating Nuke LaLoosh’s guitar in Bull Durham: “It ain’t ‘woolly,’ it’s ‘weary,’ and nobody’s got stress, they’re wearing a dress. Dammit, I hate it when people get the words wrong!”

Hot mess

The readers of Rolling Stone voted The Killers’ 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, as the 33rd best debut album in history. The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was first. After listening to Hot Fuss, I’m illin’. The Killers are actually just a hair band that escaped from the 1980s – a marriage of synth-pop Spandau Ballet and pretty-boy power-rockers Night Ranger. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

Four of the 11 tracks on Hot Fuss were hits. Why? Sun spots? “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine,” the leadoff batter, opens with an R&B guitar hook that gave me hope for the rest of the album. They abandon it after the first minute. The guitar break based on the hook is taken instead by the keyboards and has nothing to do with the beginning of the song. Their music wanders, and they are lost.

But I did like “Midnight Show,” which springs from Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” and from Billy Idol’s “White Wedding,” which I guess proves that I’ve escaped from the ’80s, too.

The Killers enjoy playing with words, which sometimes gets you this:

Well somebody told me
You had a boyfriend
Who looked like a girlfriend
That I had in February of last year

But it also gets you “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier” and their immortal “Hey shut up, hey shut up, yeah.”

I agree. Shut up.

Hit the road, Raymond

Ray Charles’ The Ultimate Hits Collection Discs 1 and 2 includes every novelty number the man ever recorded plus every song in which he shouted “Wait a minute!” His cover of “Yesterday” sounds like he’s trying to finish before his train arrives, plus he shouts “Wait a minute!” Charles was a genius, but buy one of his non-greatest-hits albums instead.

Next time, you get the Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear edition of Run-DMSteve: Albums I liked!